Windows 10 reaches 5% market adoption in under three weeks

Microsoft released Windows 10 on July 27th worldwide and after three weeks has managed 53 million downloads. That accounts for 4.95 per cent of the desktop market share, pushing Windows 10 above Mac OS X 10.10, Windows 8, Vista and Linux.

It is a leap of 1.4 per cent since last week, when Windows 10 held 3.5 per cent market share. Microsoft approved 1,500 machines per second at peak times throughout the past three weeks, showing the massive amount of people accepting the free upgrade.

Windows 7 and 8.1 are the biggest takers of the free update, but Microsoft is still far away from breaking down the fragmentation. It will need to push Windows 7 down to 30 per cent by the end of the year to make sure it can push new updates to as many people as possible.

The speed of Windows 10 growth could see the 10 per cent milestone hit by the end of September. We are expecting rate of adoption to drop heavily by the end of August, as Microsoft fulfills all of its requests from customers to upgrade for free.

Microsoft is pushing out weekly patches for customers on Windows 10, which they must download. The lack of ability to stop these updates is making privacy and security advocates worried, who want automatic updates turned off by default.